Awareness
Training in Learning and Teaching

by William
Plain (1991)
Turin, Italy: Edizioni il Capitello.

William Plain's Awareness
Training in Learning and Teaching is a welcome reminder that the scientifically
quantifiable approach, important as it has been to the establishment of
the ELT field, is not the only approach open to us in improving our understanding
of teacher and learner development. It's an interesting, speculative study
of how the essentially spirit-enhancing practice of awareness can be used
by individuals to increase their sensitivity to the role which insight plays
in the learning and teaching process. By focusing attention on the real
but largely immeasurable issue of "personal growth" within the individual
teacher as a factor in teacher training and subsequent practice as a teacher,
the discussion will provide much food for thought for those readers who
may be seeking a more expansive philosophical foundation for their chosen
profession than is generally offered by more traditional teacher training
literature.

"Awareness
is . . . a completely open barrierless interaction in which the learner
and the learning field completely coincide." - William Plain (p. 4)

Not all books, however,
are best read in the order in which they were written: depending on the
reader's background knowledge and life experience - one's 'schemata' - certain
texts may prove to be more beneficial if we first survey and find our way
around them before we plunge into page one. Awareness Training in Learning
and Teaching is a good example of this proviso. As the writer himself
suggests in his introduction, "There are difficulties involved in using
a term such as 'awareness' which is frequently employed in educational literature
as well as in everyday speech, and in addition carries a wide range of meanings.
This has obvious disadvantages in that professional communication may be
hindered by the fact that each interlocutor is unaware of the fact that
the other is using the word in a different way to himself" (xiii).
While it is true, as the writer further suggests, that "the residual vagueness
inherent in this word is not a disadvantage... [because it] will hopefully
permit each person to acquire an understanding of his practice via the medium
of his own intuitive processes" (xiii), nonetheless, the
structure of the book provides readers with a choice of reading order which,
depending on the individual's previous 'awareness of awareness,' may determine
to what extent the book is in fact helpful to the reader in explicating
these intuitive processes.

The book is divided
into three parts, the first two of which, "The Practice of Awareness" and
"The Nature of Awareness," are comprised of the writer's own exploration
of the subject. The discussion in Part 1 uses as its focal point the context
of how lecturers attempt to develop awareness in participants on a MA TEFL
course and the factors, such as individual differences, anxiety and time,
which are involved in the participants' own perception of this awareness
training. Part 2, as its title implies, is a more open-ended discussion
of the writer's search for a more creative mode of learning "...in an attempt
to generate concepts that could provide as rich a source of useful insights
as possible" in contrast to "the conscious rational mind, the ego, conditioning,
and being subject to our models and world views" which results in "paradigmatic
limitations" (53). For this purpose, the writings of J.
Krishnamurti, the great Indian teacher, form an essential base in providing
the defining characteristics of awareness training - "watching, awareness
and attention" (66)- which create the potential for "the
thunder of insight" (66) to take place.

"Awareness
breeds awareness. In this sense it is important that the teacher
himself should have obtained a reasonably high degree of awareness,
not so much in that he will be emulated by his students, but rather
that his active, creative, searching spirit will continually be
discovering little ways in which his content, or his presentation,
or even his asides, can be structured in such a manner as to produce
a result which goes in the direction desired." - William Plain (p.7)

The third part of the book
is a collection of individual interviews with twelve of the most innovative
and 'aware' teacher trainers in the ELT field - Martin Bygate, Don Porter,
Mario Rinvolucri, Jon Roberts, Pauline Robinson, Steven Smith, Gill Sturtridge,
Alan Tonkin, Adrian Underhill, Ron White, Eddie Williams and Tessa Woodward
- interviewed by the writer during his MA course at the University of Reading in 1987 and 1988. By asking
each lecturer to describe his or her definition and practice of 'awareness'
in the teacher training courses he/she conducts, the result is a series of
diverse, lively discussions which not only reveal a great deal about what
awareness training means in practical terms, but also show us 'between the
lines' how a caring teacher training staff can achieve 'unity in diversity'
- that is, how it is possible to work towards a common goal of helping the
course participants to achieve personal and professional growth while, at
the same time, respecting one another's individual growth as teacher trainers.
Essentially, the interviews illustrate very well a central concept of the
book as a whole: that, undefinable, immeasurable and impossible to program
as it may be, "insight is action" (67).

As suggested above,
these three parts present the reader with a choice of reading order which
may influence to what extent the many valuable ideas in this book become
accessible. Beginning at the beginning may be fine for readers already familiar
with Krishnamurti's work, or those who have knowledge of the concept of
awareness through such spiritual writers as the Zen Master Eihei Dogen Zenji
(Instructions for the Zen Cook, contained in the commentary by Kosho Uchiyama
Roshi in From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment: Refining Your Life), the
Indian Jesuit retreat master Anthony
de Mello (Awareness) or Sogyal Rinpoche (The Tibetan Book of Living
and Dying) - as well as many other sources - or, of course, those who are
themselves practitioners of any one of the many forms of awareness training
through meditation. Within the confines of the ELT field, readers who have
been exposed to the "Rashomon"-inspired,
multiple perspectives approach inherent in John Fanselow's method of non-judgmental
observation and his interest in the "Ah ha!" experience of learning, will
also find familiar echoes in Mr. Plain's work.

"When you have an insight
about e.g. language, you don't have to subsequently go through a process
of learning: the insight is in itself an awareness of that grammatical
relationship or whatever. The state of awareness that triggers insight
is thus a direct way to learning, or rather to acquisition, as there
is no effort in the act of insightful acquisition as is implied by
the concept of learning."
- William Plain (p. 64)

Readers without previous
exposure to some form of awareness training in theory or practice might perhaps
best begin the book with the interviews in Part 3, particularly as numerous
quotations from these interviews are used to illustrate various points of
the discussion in the first two parts. Diverse as the interviews are, they
nonetheless provide an overview of what is meant by awareness to which virtually
all teachers will be able to relate some aspect of their own experience. Tessa
Woodward's delightful description, for example, of how she has course participants
'exorcise' their 'ghosts of teachers past' in order "to bring it to the surface
and discuss it and think about it" (165) is an excellent, concrete
introduction to awareness training in action. Similarly, Adrian Underhill's
description of the kind of sensitively 'aware' counselling that can take place
between a teacher trainer and his or her students provides a clear picture
of the personal stance which is one of the central goals of awareness training:
"...the first thing for me is to, in myself, try to be prepared, centred,
not necessarily prepared in my lesson plan, but prepared in myself, as prepared
as I can be, as fully hu man as I can be, so that I am more alert to the messages
that are coming from someone else and from myself" (137). Simply
by reading through the many insightful reflections of the interviewees, certain
readers may well be better prepared to understand and appreciate the discussion
which precedes this section of the book.

Conclusion

Exactly what kind of reader, however, is this book for? This is a difficult
question, because, while the context is focused primarily on the development
of awareness through teacher training, there is no reason to suggest that
readership be limited solely to a teacher trainer audience. While the warning
must be given that this is not an "easy" book to read - greater clarification
of many areas would have been helpful if a wider audience was intended -
nonetheless it contains a great variety of ideas which are in themselves
worth the effort to discover and which may be of interest to a wide variety
of readers. For example, given a good deal of its subject matter, the book
is likely to be of interest to teachers currently on a MA course or planning
to start one. Beyond that, however, since the practice of awareness is above
all meant to be a life-enhancing one, the book has potential to suggest
new modes of learning and teaching to virtually anyone concerned with his
or her personal or professional development. And this may lead, as the writer
hopes, to "a direction which will be taken by a substantial, and influential,
stream of research in the not too distant future" (68).